Understandably in this economy most small businesses are on the cheap, the problem lies with a misunderstanding of the needs of your business. As a business owner there are many things in your business you can cut, even fixed expenses can be cut but the one thing that you should not go on the complete cheap on is your website, either the one you presently have or the one you are planning on building.

There are items that can be cut which include some of the functionality or even the size of the site, but what cannot be cut is your website being properly optimized for organic search results, this is singularly the most important part of any website and usually this is what small companies overlook as most businesses or individuals think that simply putting a great looking website online will bring in the business, it won’t! Some will hire a designer that says he knows SEO when all he really knows is the proper way to mow his yard, before settling on a someone to build your new website you will need to do some homework.

Honestly small business people need to have a basic understanding of being online or simply as for example of rankings on website that the designer has done, this is the simplest way to see if he even has a basic understanding of what organic SEO is even about. If his or her website only ranks for their business name then they do not know squat on what organic SEO is even about, or if they just load up the title tags with keywords that have no relevance to the content then they have a very basic understanding of the process, though If they are charging you for this your website may end up in the sandbox for spamming.

You do not have to believe me but to be honest I have been doing this for over 12 years now and my websites are some of the highest ranked websites for relevant keywords that pertain the what the business is and does. Personally I have made many people a lot of money over the years and still today do work for these companies, while other people have paid me to teach them and today make a lot of money doing the same thing and of course they do it right.

If you are on a budget then start small and grow with the website business that Is created, having the updates made to your website with profits as this is a much better choice than go on the cheap and only get a nice design and all of the functionality as you will be paying and paying a lot more in the short term with the major search engines as you will have to buy rankings for the keywords relevant to your busines. This is what most SEO’s actually do, they charge you a premium and then they pay GOOGLE, MSN or even YAHOO for the rankings and you’re out of pocket expense will never go down in fact this could cost thousands a month as opposed to just having the expense upfront one time. Many of the websites I personally have done have not needed updates for a year or more and still rank well on the search engines, though the websites I maintain are updated at least every 3 months as the search engines like fresh content.

My development company offers a wide range of options from just getting started to a high end website with all of the functionality, of course all of our websites are properly optimized for local, regional and global rankings, you also need to understand that global ranking are not attained quickly but built over time and incorporate much more than simply having a website online as the rankings of your competitor will come into major play and how many incoming links their websites have in addition to how they are optimized. As for local and regional results you can attain these quite quickly and start the business rolling again of course there is the competition factor, meaning how your competitor website is done.

I can do a site survey for you prior to building your online business to give you a good idea on how you will be ranked along with a time frame it will take to achieve that ranking at no additional charge. The best advice I can give to anyone that wants an online business is to not to wait till you are broke to start your online business.

Good luck with your online business and I hope that I have added some insight on getting started and remember proof of rankings before having a company do your website. See how their websites rank, no rankings then I would not be cutting any checks.